Ar-Rahman · Madani · ayah 19 of 78

Ar-Rahman 55:19

مَرَجَ ٱلْبَحْرَيْنِ يَلْتَقِيَانِ

“He released the two seas,[1596] meeting [one another];”

Saheeh International

Essence

He let the two seas loose like a herd turned out to pasture, and they meet, and they still do not take the land.

A reflection

Released, and still held

A man buys a house on a cliff with a wall of glass facing the ocean. He shows his guests the view the way some men show a car. It is his, he says: the best stretch of sea on the coast. Every winter, the same sea takes another metre of the cliff below his garden.

This ayah describes the sea with a verb that makes such ownership laughable. Maraja: He let them loose. The commentaries explain it from the herd. A man maraja his animal when he turns it out and leaves it to roam. The two seas, the salt and the sweet, were released like that, free to run.

Released, not caged. And still they do not overrun everything. One major commentary dwells on this. The great waters are joined to an encircling sea, yet they do not cover the earth. By the grace of Allah the land is left exposed, so that human beings have somewhere to live. Press anyone who explains this by nature alone, it adds, and his explanations run out one after another.

There is a quiet rebuke to human pride in that picture. We fence a little shoreline, build a wall, buy a view, and call the sea ours. The sea was never held by us. It was let loose by Someone else, and it is held back by Him every moment it does not come further in.

He needs nothing from our acknowledgement (35:15). We need, badly, to know who is holding the water.

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